


Long Dark Blues

by g_crowley



Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Exploration, Minor Character Death, Other, POV Second Person, Survival Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2020-10-13 08:48:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20579756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/g_crowley/pseuds/g_crowley
Summary: Germ explores a cave, but ends up finding something he was never meant to discover. Something bad. Something old. Something angry.





	1. Taphead

**Author's Note:**

> will add more characters as the story progresses but im writing this thing by the seat of my pants, so be kind ok?

It’s a beautiful morning in the Mesas, and your backpack tugs at your shoulders with every rock your bike goes over. Bushes flutter past and the gears of your bike hum as you pedal down the path to Cave #14 -- one of the last great, unexplored caves of Colorado, and your destination. Some say the cave is haunted, others say morons enter it and only the lucky escape. You’ve trained for this for weeks upon end, first at home in Pennsylvania, then right after you moved, and now the real deal is just at the end of the trail.

When you arrive, a single post marks where to enter, and you lock your bike to it. Ahead is the dusty hills, dust that speckles your black nylon jacket. You adjust your hat to fit a helmet over it and preemptively flick the headlamp on.

Your name is Jeremy Warton -- you go by Germ Warfare.

Your backpack is full of things any spelunker would need: ropes, carabiners, flashlight, protein bars, and of course, an emergency radio. Nobody has ever been rescued from the cave when they don’t come out themselves, but you probably won’t go deep enough to lose the signal. You check your watch, and then hustle to the entrance of the cave. Your roommate is supposed to get help if you don’t come back the next morning, and you expect to make it back to your bike by 9 PM. With a swig from your water bottle and a deep breath in, you march towards the entrance, a reluctant gait in your step.

The entrance to Cave #14 concaves out into a small crack in the rock, but with your chicken-bone thin physique, you shimmy through with room to spare. The light spiking past you dims as you move down the path set by the first few explorers, and the walls turn slick. From your view, the cave is a dark throat yellowed by the tint of your headlamp, and your boots clunking on the floor send echoes into the stomach, presumably. You chuckle to yourself, thinking it better to not picture the cave as some beast. Still good to keep an eye out, though.

You come to a dead end, or at least a dead end to your walk. The chamber looks like a stone beehive, with small holes burrowed into the rock, each with a sign signaling where each one leads (“Great Hall”, “The Bottomless Pit”, “Molina’s Folly”). At your feet is a passage just large enough for you to squeeze through, and a sign with a question mark and an arrow pointing down. Your notebook shows a map detailing the passages mapped before in solid lines, squiggling across the lined paper in chaotic sync. Your route is a less certain dotted line, trying to follow the pattern before trailing off page. The backpack is tied to your waist and dropped on the ground.

You look around you, past where you came and think. _What if I just turned around? Headed back, took off the clothes and took a 6 hour nap in my bunk?_ The air around you shifts, and you pause for a second, staring off into space. _If I went back to bed, then I might as well be dead in it._ You scratch an X into the wall above you, take a deep breath, and squeeze in.

The walls are closer than ever, and they seem to screech at you as the nylon brushes past it, gathering mud and dust. You hear dripping sounds in the darkness ahead, the scraping of your backpack against the cave floor, and the sounds of eroded rocks clapping against the ground. A sandstone cave with water never lasts for long, so you try to keep from wiggling too much.

Around 20 minutes later, the passage opens up to a bigger chamber, shiny with water flowing down the sides. The walls are granite now, and you rest easy for a second before marking another X where you came in. Carefully, you feel your way along the wall, making sure to take note of cracks and stalagmites on the ceiling, planning each step on the uneven ground. You finally come to a hallway, or as close as you can come to a hallway. The smell of wet rock floats up. The way keeps getting wider and wider until its as wide as a living room. The air gets thinner and thinner. You’re sure the areas as wide as the Great Chamber, and the only sounds in the cave are the pounding of your boots and the scratching of your pencil in the notebook.

It looks like nothing you’ve could imagine, or so you think -- you can’t tell past the thin beam of your lamp. There’s even a way down, almost like a ramp, and you let the wall guide you down. It’s incredible, with the light and pyrite dazzling above reflecting light and the ceiling going up and up and your feet whiffing the next step, causing you to push yourself back onto the floor before taking a stride into the unknown.

Your mind races. You dig in your backpack for your first aid kit and find the green glow stick inside, cracking it over your knee and filling the inch of air around it with a ghostly glow. It travels in your shaky hand from the ground to over the lip of the drop, with nothing below it but night. Inhale. Drop.

…

There is no clatter of plastic and rock. Your mind races again.

You bring out some stakes with haste and pound one into a crack in the granite. The rope goes around it, the harness goes on, and the two combine as you construct a rappel down. Under your breath you swear to reach the bottom, take notes and come back up before heading back home.

Bracing yourself with the rocks and rope, you lean back first over the edge, asshole tightly clenched. One step, and your feet are horizontal; two steps, your hands as well. The rocks that jut out stretch from a foot to a yard in distance, stretching your joints as well. You shuffle down the cliff with care. The rock is grain, pebbles brushing past your hands as you struggle to find holds. Another stake goes in the wall, 20 feet down.

Your lamp starts to flicker. Uh-oh. Time to shuffle faster. You estimate you’re about 40 feet down. With the shuddering light, you mark an X and center a spike on the wall. As you tap, the wall shudders. Uh-oh. You stop. The wall doesn't. Uh-oh. In an attempt to scramble up, you plant both feet on the wall and try to run up. The line goes loose.

Uh-oh.

In the few moments of calm before you hit the angled wall below, you wonder what people will do with what you’ve found. Are they gonna turn it into a supply cache? (You hope not.) Will wide-gapped tour guides show wannabe naturalists down the cliff named after your demise? (You hope not.) Will they find your body? (You hope not.) The line hums a high-pitched dirge for you as you freefall down. Before you black out, you see a burst of light from under you as the concrete breaks. You think of your room.

\---

You come to, and above you is a dark hole surrounded by unnatural, crumbling grey. Underneath you is canvas. Nothing is broken, nothing is shattered. You lift yourself up off your back, dusting yourself off and blinking your eyes. The time is 2 PM, and you appear to be on top of a truck.

You are in a road tunnel, and the fluorescent lights are on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7ByLtYe0pg [Taphead - Stars Of The Lid]


	2. Blue Calx

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Germ decides to explore his new location.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note: this work takes heavy inspiration from weaver's Quests (especially NanQuest) so if things seem a bit too similar to that in the future let me know so i can make some changes

The hole you fell through looks like some sort of mold spot on the tunnel’s arc, with little spores wafting from the branches of cracks. Of course, without the blaring fluorescent lights, it’d look like a slightly taller chamber in a cave, but now it’s the void. To your right is the glowstick, a faint green glow on the light canvas top of the truck. In the hours passed, it went from the brightest thing in the cave to a meek wisp around a plastic tube. On the floor is your pack, which you hope cushioned the incredibly expensive radio equipment inside.

You slide off of the truck top and try to land on your feet, only for them to wobble and give way, knocking your head into the side of a car door. The rearview mirror provides support on your way up as you gain your balance and bearings. For one thing, you have no idea where the hell you landed. I mean, you can tell it’s a road tunnel, but there’s no way that any power station of any kind would be running electricity to it -- and yet, you smell rust in the air, and hear the hum of the fans churning and recycling it to wherever you are. If the systems are active in the tunnel, then that means someone is running it, and that they’re close.

The contents of your backpack seem to be alright, even the radio, which only sustained a few dents in the fall; the protein bars are beyond saving though. You heft it out, switch it on, and affix the headpiece to your ear. It’s only a few seconds before an unholy screech pierces your eardrums.

“Oh yeah,” you mutter, “I’m prolly too far down for it to work.” Dum-dum.

The gunk in your throat nearly chokes you out, and you hack up a loogie the size of a quarter on the asphalt. “Blech.” You shove the radio and backpack under the car -- not like you’ll be doing any climbing down here. In your pockets is a Belgian Reserve utility knife, a wallet with $20 cash and your ID, and a flashlight. Collapsed rocks and tile behind you seal the way behind you, most likely from erosion or unstable infrastructure, so that leaves you with one way to go: forward. 

When walking past the abandoned cars, you look inside each one to see if there are any signs of life, but no such luck. Dust coats the interior upholstery by the inch, and the doors refuse to budge, so looting them is out of the question. Your footsteps echo with each clack on the greyed road, and the tunnel gets colder. The tunnel, a round chamber with pipes lining the roof above and stained white tiles plastering the sides, curves down at a gradual pace as you stroll past locked sedan after locked sedan. Your mind wanders.

_I don’t know how or why I survived that. I don’t think I should have. I mean, what if I’m in that purgatory thing? I’m just gonna keep going and going, the cars are gonna repeat -- look, I swear that I’ve seen that two door rusty red car like seventeen times so far. And there’s another one of those trucks! Am I just walking right into Hell? I expected Hell to be warmer. Less concrete, more… fire. Just fire, pits of people being skinned and then being turned into demon butt plugs. God, imagine being a serial killer or something, sacrificing a bunch of random people to Satan and they put you in the demon butt plug section of Hell. I mean, what did I do to deserve to be here? Did I unwittingly murder someone? Do you go to hell for shoplifting once? Shrimp? If I went to Hell for eating shrimp I’m gonna be so p-_

You hit a turnstile and trip head over heels onto hard cement. It seems the tunnel ends here, and opens up to two giant blast doors.  
“Holy crap.” You take a whiff; the air smells of copper and talc. There’s blue powder on the platform and the empty parking lot next to it. The letters, bigger than you are, painted on the dull grey metal read:

SITE OHIO  
UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF THE US MILITARY  
TRESPASSING WILL BE PROSECUTED VIA CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

You’re not sure what to make of this. A part of you hopes the US Military will ask questions before shooting. Another part of you is shitting your pants with fear. Overall, things look bad for you. Nevertheless, you need to find a way to open the door, and the light coming from around an ajar door in the wall of the tunnel seems like a good start.

The cobwebs around the door snap away and fall down when you push the door before covering your hand snapping the lights on. There’s a revolving chair on the ground in front of the computer deck, its pleather covering frayed and flecked from time. You set it upright and blow a puff of dust off the keyboard. The screen is plastered with dust, so you wipe that off with your cuff. You click the on button, and, after a few moments, the computer boots up. The OS is pretty old, but you’ve had a lot of experience with old computers, so you can navigate it easily. For some reason, whoever used the computer last left it unlocked, as if they were planning to get back to it. There’s no web browser, but the apps include a mail system -- inbox emptied, nothing but spam -- and a CCTV/PA system. Here goes. 

When the camera switches on after a burst of static, you see a metal chamber in what you estimate to be about 72 pixels, all buzzing and jittering. As the camera pans from left to right (you can’t control it), you spy the blast door’s other side, a catwalk above some water, and what looks like an elevator. The camera pans to the left. A sharp ding sounds from off screen. You reach for the mic, hoping that whoever’s in the elevator can hear you.

“Hello? Are you with the... US military?”

The speaker to your right crackles. “Yep.”

“My name is Germ. Last name Warfare.”

“Pfft, that’s a weird name.” You grumble away from the mic. “Private Lee. Greggory if you want to be specific.” You still can’t see anyone on camera, and the elevator is empty, so maybe his mic is just out of view. 

You cough. “I’m trapped down here, and from the looks of it, you guys are too. Could you open the door? I didn’t bring any guns or whatever.” The utility tool softly jutting into your side might count, but you doubt anyone with an automatic rifle would count that as a serious threat. The other side falls silent. “Also, all my stuff is under a car, close to the cave in.” You hear some clanging away from the mic.

“Give me a second, dude. Just… trying to get the door open. Stay where you are.” You lean back in your chair, and then do a really cool spin.

“Cool spin.”

You chuckle. “You can see me?”

“Yep. Hold up, its coming opennnn…” The gears next to the booth click and groan as the mechanisms inside drag the doors open. “Now.”

The chamber finishes open when you step out to the light. A figure, with two pointed ears and a snout, is defined in the distance by the light of the elevator. “Hey!” You wave. For some reason, the figure doesn’t respond, causing you to wave slower. “Um, do I have to put my hands up or something? I ha-”

The figure gets on all fours and starts running at you.

You cannot get into the booth were you were fast enough. In the nick of time, you shove the chair under the door handle and back away as it beats on the door. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit…” You draw the knife from your pocket, extending the dull one inch blade in a last ditch attempt at defense that is going to obviously fail. “I’m armed!” you lie. There’s no reply, just scratching and indistinct growling. Your back flattens against the wall, both hands on the handle of your little knife.

Then, the pounding falls silent. Four gunshots ring out, muffled by the door, and then a knock.

“Alright, threat neutralized. C’mon out.”

“What’s going on? W-who the hell was that?”

“Uhh, we think someone went nuts on bath salts and tried to leave lockdown. Had to take him out.”

You walk over to the door, knife sheathed. Whoever this is, they definitely know a lot more than you do about the situation down here. You hesitate. “Are you-”

“Sergeant Lee? Yep. My weapon’s holstered, don’t worry.”

You pull the chair away from the handle and open it, hands up. “Alright, I-”

When the burst of light from outside finishes blinding you, you see the pistol on the floor, magazine missing. He punches you in the stomach and pushes you to the ground winded.

“Hey.” The fox stands over you. You can make out a few things -- weird markings on his chest fur, tufts of hair on his ears, a complete lack of clothing -- but all you can focus on is his eyes, shining down at you. He looks indifferent about this.

You can’t get a word out, your stomach pulses like it’s lodged in your lungs. He rolls you on your back with his right foot. “Don’t worry dude, I’m not gonna kill ya.”

The person who you assume is Sergeant… wait, no… Private. Private Lee. Shit. God damn it. They pick your head up by your beak. “He’s got bigger plans for you, bud.”

The back of your head slams down into the concrete. Everything goes black.

\---  
The voices come in swirling, like a tremolo. You only understand the voices to the front of you.

“...ook, someone ne… “

“...st’ve came in while we were slee… “

“...no, I don’t know him, do y…”

“...look…”

“He’s up.”

Your crusted eyelids lift. The light blinds you, and you put a hand over your eyes for shade. Your backbone pops as you sit up; due to this, your head starts to pound, as if it was reminded to make you feel like throwing up. You do. “Mornin’,” chimes a bright voice to your left. “You ok?” asks a lower one to your front.

“Mmph…” Your hat and clothes are still on, and your stuff is still somehow in your pocket -- the fox must not have taken it. A tan goat looks down at you, peering past their glasses. “Lemme guess, Gregg caught you.”

You tilt your head up to see a raccoon wearing a blue cap peering through the bars in front of you, scratching the beard under their snout. “Wh-where am I?”

The goat squats to meet your face. “Welcome to Ohia.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKA1B5Ymuo [Blue Calx - Aphex Twin]


	3. Varmints

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Germ wakes up (again), only to find a few friendly faces standing over him, and a few unfriendly bars as well.

You get the feeling that any more blows to the head will start leaving some serious damage. There’s a goose egg on your temple, throbbing, and a goat standing over you. “Guhh, that’s nasty. Don’t worry, it doesn’t look like he gave you any brain damage.” You push yourself to your feet, slightly flailing your arms to catch your balance again. “I mean, you did vomit, but that’s pretty normal for someone just outta the cryopods.” You’re not following what this person is saying whatsoever.

“Hey, leave him alone, Jackie. He went in expecting to come out to see the site fixed, and instead he got his ass kicked by some hick with full body cult tattoos.” The raccoon drums his fingers on the bars of his open air cell.

“Ohia,” Jackie corrects.

“I’m not calling that; it’s a stupid name. We called it Site Ohio when we were awake, so it’s gonna stay Site Ohio.”

“It’s in a state of apocalypse, so it needs a cool apocalypse name. You’re no fun, Cole.”

“My bad, I forgot I was dragged here specifically to entertain your ass.”

“And I forgot how I was dragged here specifically for you to be up it 24/7.”

You’re not sure what’s happening, at all. People are squabbling. Your head hurts. It’s cold, and the sound of the lights above you are boring a hole into your skull. 

“Please, shhhh…” You wave at the two to shut up, and they abruptly do, staring at you. Breathe in. Breathe out. OK.

“I’m Germ. I don’t understand what the hell is going on right now. I understand literally none of the words coming out of either of your mouths. So someone better explain to me what the hell I’m doing in a jail cell, and why the hell you guys are talking about… cryopods?”

They exchange a quick glance, and the goat (presumably Jackie) looks directly into your eyes.

“You don’t know what the cryopods are?”

“Nope.”

“Are you… from outside?”

You nod. Right now you’re pretty sure where you are isn’t outside in the slightest.

“Holy shit. Hoe. Lee. Shit!” She fistpumps, does a little kick too.

“Wh-whuh...how?” Cole (you think) scratches his head, confused.

“I-”

She grabs you by the shoulders, spins you around. “Pfft, who cares? Ohia’s probably crawlin with feds looking for Meyers’ body, and it’s only a matter of time before they get us out.”

“Feds?”

She stops spinning you around. “Yeah, feds. You’re a Spec Op, right?”

“...No.”

You hear a few pipes dripping in the seconds of silence she takes to process this.

“Well, then how did you get in?”

“Spelunking accident.”

“Spe…” She stumbles back into the bars and hooks her head over them with her horns. “No… No no no no no!” Cole sighs, and the duo falls silent.

You sit down and tap the concrete floor. The air smells of old nickels and water, and the whole place appears grey. A bedroll lies in the corner, and a bucket with stains around it squats in the direct opposite one. “That looks pretty full over there. How long have you guys been here?”

They don’t answer.

“Hmph.”

You dig through your wallet. There are some worn $10 bills in there, along with someone else’s license and a few sticks of gum.

“What do you guys eat down here?”

Still nothing. It’s starting to bug you.

“Hey, I get that it’s disappointing that I'm not a Fed, but seeing as we’re gonna be here a while, we could at least say something to each other.”

Jackie gets up and moves over to lie on the sparse bedroll. She seems uninterested in interacting with you past breathing the same air now. Cole gets on his butt, sitting criss-cross on the concrete. “Well, when we’re sleeping someone -- we’re guessing Gregg -- brings us food. It’s jerky, some bread, and a jug of water most of the time, but sometimes there’s chocolate in there.”

“Any idea why?”

“Well, we’re prisoners. Can’t let us starve.”

“How long-”

“About three weeks,” interrupts Jackie. “Three weeks of jerky, water, and shitty potato chips.” She doesn’t follow it with anything, but the exasperated sigh is implied.

“...yeah.” 

“Do you know that Gregg guy? Like, anything past his name?”

Cole shrugs. Jackie doesn’t do much of anything.

“Hmph.” Another stern silence steeps in. The one-level cells around you have no real padding or anything that could separate the prisoners past the bars. The bedrolls line the corners of all the others cells too, as if standard. If this place functioned in any way before you got here, the prisoners must have lead awful lives. Above you, pipes hiss with water flowing through, and the dust still floats around, pushed by the fans above. It’s freezing. 

Then, from a distance, you hear footsteps, unmistakably from two boots. Jackie lurches up and follows where she thinks it’s shaking out from. “What in the god...damn…”

The figure wears a uniform, a blue jumpsuit with knee and elbow pads. A plastic card is pinned to their breast. “Security,” you whisper. The officer, a dark green alligator, swings around and points his snub-nosed revolver at you. “Hands up!” he sputters out, his hands shaking. You obey.

“Hey hey hey, calm down, calm down. We’re friendly. We’re not gonna attack you.” Jackie seems not to care about the twitchy fingered gunman waving a gun at her, and elects to reach her hands out. “Unlock us, and we can he-”

“I said hands up, dammit!” He sticks the piece directly between her eyes. She obeys.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? We’re locked in a damn cage! What are we gonna do, grope you to death?” sneers Cole.

The guard looks nervously around. “My orders when the Site enters shutdown are to put the jail under maximum lockdown and keep the prisoners from escaping. I wake up from my pod, and… everyone’s just… missing.” He sucks in air and keeps the gun trained on Jackie.

“Hmm. When did you wake up?”

“About five minutes ago -- whuh, wait, no! No! Shut up! I’m not giving confidential information to you assholes!” He pauses to take a breath, sweat dripping down his scales. “Hey wait, where are your uniforms?”

“We don’t have any! We! Aren’t! Prisoners!”

The words take a few tense seconds to bore into his skull. He lowers the pistol. “Who put you guys here? Wh-where is everyone?”

Everyone replies with a communal shrug. “We woke up, and everything was wrecked to shit,” replies the goat. You begin to say something, but she clamps your beak shut. “Some nutso fox with a bunch of scars on him knocked us out and we woke up here, right Cole?” The raccoon nods, head balanced on the bars.

“Fox with scars… alright, I’ll take a look around.” He starts down the hallway.

“Wait!”

“Huh?”

“Aren’t you gonna free us?”

“...it’s against the law…”

“Listen, you need some sort of back up, don’t you? What if the fox tries to knock you out too? Then you’re in the same boat as us, only sans a gun, radio, and key.”

He fidgets, like gears are turning, no, grinding in his head. “Hrgh, fine. But stay in front of me, all of ya.”

He takes out a white keycard, and the door clicks open the moment he swipes it through the door’s slot. The gator motions for you to go ahead.

“Thank you,” you say, beak no longer in Jackie’s clutches. “The name’s Germ.”

“Germ? That’s a weird name.”

“You got a name?”

“Scriggins. Deputy Scriggins.”

“Great. Can we get a move on, Deputy?”

\---

The recreation area is just as cold as the cells are, despite being constructed from warm and inviting materials such as concrete and mesh. Basketball hoops and treadmills line the area, and all of them look less than fully functional; there seems to be a decay about them, cobwebbed and raggled. Soon you’re past them, and onto the long vinyl hallways to the cafeteria, windows wide and displaying the monstrous varmint traps of the prison. No matter where you step, the vents rattle and hum.

The floors clatter with each step, and the ceiling hums. Deputy Scriggins has formed a line -- you first, then Cole, Jackie, and him at the tail end, holding the hand cannon. You slow down to keep at Cole’s pace.

“Hi,” you beam in a whisper, “Can you please explain SOMETHING to me? Like, what the hell is this place? What’s a cryopod? Why is there a bunker this close to the Mesas? Whuh, why is it shut down?”

Cole sighs, scratches under his hat. “Well, you know how things are like out there, right? Four revolutions, widespread poverty, I mean, what happened in New York was a total disaster. Heavy shit.” He gulps down some saliva and coughs. “The, eh, the US Army was getting a lot of extra funding lately, and some General -- General Myers -- decided that the country needed some change. So, he diverted about a trillion dollars to build what he considered ‘Utopia’. It was a place where any American could live how the founding fathers wanted to: individual rights, no strong leaders, free trade. Seemed like a good idea, plus the Objectivist party was lobbying real hard for it, so they gave Meyers free reign. So, he built Site Ohio--”

“Ohia.” Her glasses glare out her eyes, but you can see the daggers being shot at him.

“Quiet down back there!” The good deputy prods Jackie in the back with the gun. Again.

Cole ignores the schism. “Site Ohia -- O, Ohio, Goddammit -- and offered a bunch of impoverished people ‘another shot at America’, so he said.”

“What did ‘another shot’ mean?”

The raccoon chuckles. “A shopping mall. A huge ass, undersupplied, overfunded shopping mall that was the main source of income for ‘the individual’. Of course, you could always take the dangerous jobs, handyman, crate loader, the like, but most people worked at the mall. Minimum wage. Grueling hours. No benefits. If anyone said the word ‘union’ or typed it in the inbox of their email server, the boys in blue would stick ‘em down here.”

“You guys talking about me?” interrupts Scriggins, again.

You both holler “No!” at him and get back to talking. The hallway’s longer than it seemed, and you’ve passed through three rooms by now.

“Is that what you did before… whatever’s happening now?”

“Nah, did IT work on the mainframe.”

“Ah.”

“As you can see, things went about as well as something like that could. There were riots. Unfilled apartments, too expensive to buy. The…” He jerks his head in Scriggins direction. “...pulled the homeless of the street, made ‘em disappear.” He draws his index finger across his neck and makes a sound like someone squishing a blood bag. You’re unfazed.

“And the cryopods?”

“Well, the cryopods were these person-sized metal chambers that froze whatever entered it, then unfroze it automatically after things were declared safe by the mainframe. I guess they were meant as a ‘last resort’ measure, in case the reactor blew up or contact was ceased with the outside world during a coup. Well, one day, the reactor malfunctioned, and police started orderin’ people into the pods. It was panic. People were being separated from their families, cryin’ on the floor asking for a way into a pod, and of course, the cops were just wailin’ on people. When they pushed me into my pod, only about 50% of the people in the Site were in.”

He falls silent, and looks ahead.

“Good God.” You sigh. “So he just made Rapture?”

“Huh?”

“From Bioshock? It’s a video game? Buncha mutant libertarians dukin’ it out in an underwater city?”

He grows jovial again, and chuckles. “Well, there’s no mutants down here if that’s what’s ailin ya.”

“...I mean, that wasn’t ailing me, i just…” You trail off. No words.

“Hey, guys?” Jackie inserts herself into the conversation, and gestures to the metal doors in front of you. Above it is a sign in loud official letters: “CAFETERIA”.

Scriggins marches ahead. “Well?”

“It’s closed.” You wave an arm at it.

“Well, open it.”

“Don’t you have a keycard?”

“Not a Level 2 keycard. This is a Level 1.” He pulls out the shiny plastic card and puffs up his chest, as if it’s his sole honor to be in the lowest muck of the pigpen. Jackie leers at him. “Aww, how many popcorn balls you sell to get that trinket, Cub Scout?”

“Shut it! You’re lucky I’m not getting Sheriff Borowski to send your ass back down here for disrespecting an officer of the law.” The goat stifles a snicker.

“Hmm.” You look over the faded keypad, an inch of dust coating the black Bakelite. “Y’know, for such an advanced bunker, you guys sure got some old security tech. I bet I could crack this thing in a minute.”

“You can?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s essentially a model from the 1970’s. A phone call and a whistle could crack this thing. Gimme that flashlight.”

“No way! This is my only flashlight!” He taps the sleek black cylinder like a firearm. “There’s another one on your chest, you dipshit,” says Jackie, pointing to the smaller one clipped to his breast pocket with a middle finger. With the dignity of a shitting dog, he plucks that one out, clicks it on, and hands it to you.

It takes a moment to pop off the cover and start getting an overview of the circuit, but when you do, everything fades away. You remember old books, little wiring diagrams and colored cords stretching from copper to copper. This goes here, that goes there. The voices fade out, and everything not in the beam stops existing. 

You think of the pages of that book. You think of the shelf it sat on in the living room. You think of the itchy couch you read it on. You think of Gramma. You think of home.

The lock beeps. With a sullen click, the doors budge, and everything comes back to you. “Alright guys, it’s… open?”

Everything in front of you is dark, and the light just reveals more dark. Your feet feel wet beneath you. The walls, wherever they are, no longer hum.

You are alone, and you are nowhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN5jqNFfxM0 (ELEH - Death Is Eternal Bliss)


End file.
